A reporter’s notebook
Al Jazeera’s Resul Serdar Atas recounted the scenes in Aleppo as clashes escalated between the Syrian Army and SDF forces.
I arrived in Aleppo on Wednesday morning after receiving reports of serious clashes between the Syrian Army and the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). What I got was much worse than I expected.
The heavy artillery fire was constant, extreme. My team was attacked four times; A bullet hit our equipment.
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We quickly realized that this round of encounters was not going to be as easy as previous fights over the past year.
At the root of the conflict is the government’s demand for the SDF, which has thousands of troops, to be integrated into state institutions. An agreement was reached between the two sides Last March. But there are numerous disputes over how that should happen, including the number of troops to join the SDF.
‘Overwhelming sense of despair’
The fighting is concentrated in heavily populated areas of Aleppo, particularly in the Ashrafieh and Sheikh Maqsood districts. In total, the area has about 400,000 inhabitants. Within 24 hours of the start of the fighting, 160,000 people fled their homes. It was like an exodus.
On Thursday, when the conflict reached its peak, people struggled to make their way through the streets without getting caught in the crossfire. The children screamed and screamed in terror. Families held each other’s hands and clothes so as not to trace each other.
An elderly man said he had seen enough after nearly 15 years of civil strife: “May God take my soul so I can rest,” he said.
An elderly woman, who could not walk, fell to the ground in the crowd and was trampled by several people. I saw her son crying as I tried to drag her off the ground.
The last time I saw such a sight was in 2014 when ISIL (ISIS) attacked the Kurdish-majority city of Kobane in Syria. There was an overwhelming sense of hopelessness, helplessness, and the sense that everything was coming to an end.
A short-lived ceasefire
On Friday, the warring parties agreed to a morning ceasefire and the SDF leadership agreed that its soldiers would drop their heavy weapons and leave the area. However, when the bus arrived to pick them up, more scuffles broke out. Later the same thing happened when the buses came back. Our sources told us this was due to divisions within the SDF, with more radical factions resisting the call to lay down arms.
The back-and-forth ended with the Syrian government setting a deadline of 6pm (15:00 GMT) on Friday for the remaining civilians to flee, after which it would resume military operations against SDF targets. After that a fierce struggle has started again in Sheikh Maqsood.
The government has been careful to avoid the perception of demographic engineering, saying that once the area is cleared of SDF fighters, everyone can come home. It is emphasized that the battle is not between Arabs and Kurds but between government forces and non-state forces.
Meanwhile, the people of Aleppo sit between hope and fear. On the one hand, they hope that an agreement has finally been reached between the SDF and the Syrian army so that they can return to their homes. But on the other hand, after 15 years of civil war, they fear history repeating itself.